It
took five years to finally finish this book and it seems strange writing
it now, trying to recall things that happened a decade ago when I arrived
in a small town in eastern Poland without a clue. But a lack of direction
can sometimes have great benefits, because things can turn out well in
the end without the strains of making plans. Fourteen of us from a variety
of backgrounds, mostly students, were chosen by APSO (Agency for Personal
Service Overseas), the state body for overseas development, to go to Poland
and teach in state schools in small towns. This was a time when the country
was just beginning to emerge, in 1994, from fifty years of Communism,
and I think it is fair to say that most of us had no real idea what we
wanted to do with our lives generally. I can say that now with some degree
of accuracy because I only know of one member of the group who is still
teaching.

We were all on a
one-year contract when we arrived and some stuck to that one year. Others
stayed longer for various reasons - another year, two, or like myself,
five. It was a mixed experience for us all as things got very rough on
some occasions. At the same time the hospitality of the Polish people,
the friendships made and savoured, the romances, adventures and benders
all made it a unique experience that I doubt any of us will forget. It
wasnt the dark corners of Africa we were sent to, or a war zone,
or the Arctic or anywhere completely hostile. It was Eastern Europe. But
little was known about conditions there at the time and now, in 2005,
a lot has changed. Poland has opened up. Europe has opened up and the
country that I arrived in over a decade ago is no longer so much of a
mystery. But it was then. And life was very different.

This is the story
of life in a small town in Poland as I saw it. It is all real, truthful
and honest. Some of it might seem a bit offensive, but anyone who knew
me while I was there will know that no malice is intended. The Polish
people are wonderful and my stay there was all the more memorable because
of them.

We can all learn
from them and lets hope, as they reach our shores over the coming
years, that we all do.

Chapter
One

Summer
1994. It was late afternoon in the town, the heat lingering from another
day of intense, radiant sunshine. Id never imagined this country
could get so hot. But there it was, a brutal, dry heat that stung like
an iron and made everything appear rigid. The clothes hanging outside
on balconies, stiff as playing cards. Windows gaping open, gasping for
breath. Dried grass and bald patches on a playground with a swing buckling
under the heat.

People moved slowly.
Some on old black bicycles, some on foot, barely kicking up dust on streets
that were patched together with tarmac and old rock. It needed rain. It
needed some colour. It even needed some noise.

We pulled in through
the gates of a school, just myself, a driver and a guide. It was kept
well but looked as if it needed a couple of grand for a face-lift. Weeds
poked up between cracks in uneven concrete. Window panes looked like chapped
lips. Even the national flag drooped from a pole inside the gate, weary
and just about retaining its colours. Standing inside the front door of
the school was a small man, balding, sixties, a cigarette between old
fingers and a wide smile like a spade on his face. He shook hands warmly,
brought us inside to his office and made coffee in glasses, each glass
heaped with two spoonfuls of tar-like granules that should really have
passed through a percolator. The room was in stark contrast to the streets
of the town we had wound through. It was bright, spotless, smelled fresh
and was invaded by greenery from every corner. He motioned to the seats
around a large table that was well polished and sparkled like a mirror,
offering everyone cigarettes that had no filters. I declined. I was on
the verge of giving up. Anyway, I was actually starving and eyed instead
the bowl of fruit that ripened in the window next to all the plants.

The coffee was strong,
had no milk, and as it cooled, large hard flakes began floating to the
top like pieces of loose bark. I battled with the burning glass as the
man who I now realised was the school director, discussed the terms of
my contract between nods of the head, smiles and countless filterless
cigarettes. He was the type of man that immediately put a stranger at
ease. Smiles, a gentle voice, friendly gestures with the hands.

He bellowed smoke
as he spoke. It came out his mouth. It came out his nose. I thought at
one stage it would even come out his ears. If I were trying to quit Id
come to the wrong place.

Wed been to
several schools that day, dropping off colleagues one by one until I was
the last one left in the van. I had a bad taste in my mouth. All of the
places wed seen were fairly grim. Lonely outposts that were barely
mapped that had the driver going around in circles as the day wore on.
Villages with one main street, dying as it reached the outskirts, swallowed
up by a countryside that was flat and endless and met the horizon with
barely a cow to provide a focal point. Few of these villages seemed ready
to cope with the arrival of a stranger. Bus stops, train stations, petrol
stations were all in the minority. A quick search for bars, general stores,
or even supermarkets was fruitless. These villages seemed more like time
traps. Motionless and still, they hung there on the cusp of the modern
world with some of their inhabitants just about hanging in there with
them. But they held a beauty of their own.

Some of the living
quarters were also stuck in that black hole between the old and the new.
One school had somehow forgotten they were getting a foreign teacher,
a girl who smiled bravely as she was led up a flight of bare concrete
steps and into a single room by the cleaning lady who had been forced
to shoulder the blame. There were no curtains, a couch full of holes for
a bed and a bathroom with a toilet that was the colour of a rotten lung.
The woman ranted and apologised profusely, waving frantically at everything
as if with one swish of a magic wand she was going to magically transform
the room into a boudoir fit for a sleeping beauty. The girl smiled and
thanked her. We felt bad leaving her there alone and there was a short
burst of hysterical laughter back in the van. Once on the main road again,
there was barely a sign anywhere to say the place even existed and I never
passed near it again. Now, I cant even recall its name. But Ill
never forget how it looked.

The tiny village
of Sadowne was next, a place not worth describing, its only significance
being its proximity to the former death camp of Treblinka. This was the
last stop for Paul, a guy roughly the same age and as equally bewildered
as myself. He hesitated before stepping down from the van and onto the
courtyard. There stood a rather solemn looking man, the school director,
gasping heavily on a cigarette and beckoning all of us inside to his office.
There was no coffee on offer there. Just a few abrupt words from the director,
his expression tired. He didnt volunteer any false hopes that Paul
would be having a year to remember. He simply recited his duties as if
reading off a shopping list and made it all seem very plain indeed. From
the office we were led to the living quarters, a single room next to a
single Russian woman with a young kid. Immediately looking for his escape
route, Paul asked the whereabouts of a bus or train station. He was informed
the train station was some distance away and that he could get a lift
with the director whenever he wanted. Where does it go? To Warsaw, presumably.
Since I couldnt yet pronounce the name of the place I was headed
for, I didnt ask if there was a link. That was it. I shook Pauls
hand and left him there stroking his chin. Within a matter of minutes
we were back on the road.

I was going to miss
them. All of them. For two weeks wed been together at a converted
monastery in the southeast of the country, drinking mostly, making vague
attempts at learning smatterings of Polish in what was basically a familiarity
stint. Almost every night was spent bunking off to an exclusive club in
the nearby city getting drunk, every morning at a desk in a local school
by eight, cracking open bottles of fizzy mineral water and trying to get
our tongues around the Polish language. It was a tough one. And I knew
right then I was never going to really master that language. I learned
it well and it was there in my head, but rarely did it get as far as my
mouth without a lot of thinking getting in the way. That disturbed me
considering I had come here to teach a language myself. And that was a
constant cross that I could never deal with. Others coped more easily.
You could spot them during those lessons, even with the hangovers they
had a confidence about themselves. They bit into those foreign words like
food they had already tasted. They were the ones who were going to make
good teachers. Id probably have to work it that bit more.

Yet there was no
competition between anyone. If anything, everyone acted as everyone elses
crutch, particularly when the time came for us to split up and go our
various ways. Then the numbers dwindled daily and the bond was broken.
We grew sad, then bored and finally just waited our turn. Sat on the wall
outside in the courtyard of the monastery, the guys bare-chested, the
women sweating, sipping on beer and watching our pals disappear one by
one like cattle. Wondered where the hell they were being taken and how
wed all get to meet up again. All we had to go on was a list of
addresses that nobody could read and mystifying phone numbers composed
of about four digits.

Finally, the guide
turned to me and went through the details in English, looking reassuringly
pleased. I had Fridays free, if I wanted, and otherwise worked about six
teaching hours per day. Although there were a few guys in some of the
classes, the school was mostly for girls between the ages of sixteen and
early twenties and there were two other English teachers there that I
could work with. I was to focus on improving conversation skills and vocabulary
and in general introduce a more colloquial language into the class rather
than the book English that the students were used to. After
that, the rest was up to me.

I tried to look content
because my director did. So I nodded firmly and shook hands with him as
he stood. At that point, I was more concerned with my living quarters
than the job. The job would take care of itself once I had a half-decent
place to call home.

I stood at the window
and watched the van drive out through the gate, severing that last link
I had with the Irish group. It was getting slightly dark now and a lump
rose up in my throat. Here I was in a new home - clean, spacious, but
understandably bare. Just me, the hum of the fridge and the fading summer
evening sky outside, bloody orange, black at the edges. Id met a
Polish guy in Dublin before I left, who told me that summer evenings are
always colourful in Poland, and he was right. It was colourful. Deep warm
colours hanging over a landscape that was rolled out flat like a football
pitch. Theres a certain temperature in the early evenings in summer
in Poland thats neither too hot nor too cold. Its a comforting
temperature that calms the body and soothes the mind. You gaze out the
window and the sun looks as if it's being carried off gradually towards
the west like a massive slow-moving balloon. I think after the long day,
some of the rough places Id seen and the feelings of loneliness
that suddenly hit me, if it had have been pissing down rain, I would have
just turned around and gone home.

Unpacking for a year
is an odd thing. As you drag the items out one by one, theres a
sense of finality about it. Its not just a wash bag and a few books.
Theres things that suggest permanency, remind you of home. Clothes
that smell of home cooking. Towels with the scent of the washing powder
your mother uses. Books and magazines with coffee rings on the covers.
You stare at them and realise that like you, theyve travelled thousands
of miles and wont see home again for another twelve months. So they
take on a value that they previously never had. I had about three large
bags with me, one of them a lot heavier than it was the night I packed
it. So I opened the zip of this one first and began wrenching out some
of the winter clothes that lay at the top. Heavy socks, gloves, a scarf
and some of those Long Johns that were eventually used to
polish my boots. Below the clothes Id packed a few books and there
in the middle lay the cause of the bags weight - a statue of Our
Lady and a heavy wooden photo-frame with several pictures of my family
and friends smiling up at me from under a clean piece of glass. Obviously,
ma had got to the bag the night before I left when all the luggage was
sitting downstairs by the door. Mothers mean well when they do such things.
Religious relics are always a favourite. So are family photographs. But
I didnt need to see all of that right then. The statue went onto
the window-ledge in the hall and the photos just drove me to bed, feeling
like a stranger should feel in a strange land - lonely, isolated but exhilarated.

Lying there in bed,
I began to go over the images Id conjured up for myself before arriving,
comparing them to what Id seen so far. You dont expect a thousand
volts of culture shock coming to a place like this. Its not the
centre of Africa or the Middle East. Its still Europe, but its
a part of Europe that most of us have only peeped at when it was hidden
behind the iron curtain. So question marks hang over almost every aspect
of life. Id been told many things, a lot of them rather dark. One
girl whod spent a year in Warsaw had offered me a piece of information
by way of reassurance about a month before I left. You can get cornflakes
there, shed said, with a smile that faded rather miserably
once she realised that cornflakes werent on my list of priorities.
Id pictured instead the bowl they were in, a deep wooden bowl paired
off with a spoon cut from cheap tin that made a harsh sound when dropped
on a stark kitchen floor. In that bowl I saw a lot of soups. Soups made
from thick vegetables and stringy meat, meat that came from an animal
that had worked hard all its life. A horse maybe, with a shaggy coat,
a massive pair of blinkers and no name, the remainder of his carcass finishing
up as glue on the bench of a peasant carpenter.

Id pictured
timber houses, smoke gasping out of their chimneys day and night, sitting
under the shadow of grey blocks that clawed the landscape like broken
umbrellas. Id pictured old men with shattered teeth, young girls
with bright blonde hair, packed under scarves decorated with the flowers
of spring. Fields that were golden in autumn and steel blue in winter.
Cold vodka, warm beds and the sound of men singing in taverns, keeping
a beat with the thud of beer tankards on long wooden tables. As I drifted
off to sleep, I think it was fair to say I had a rather confused image
of Poland before I arrived.

Tom Galvin graduated
from University College Dublin with a BA and came to Poland in 1994 with
APSO (Agency for Personal Service Overseas) the Irish state body for overseas
development. He was posted as an English language teacher in the School
of Economics, Minsk Mazowiecki, which lies about 40 km east of Warsaw. While
there he completed his MA and began writing for the Warsaw Voice and contributing
to programmes on Radio Polonia in Warsaw. He also self-published his first
novel, Gabriel's Gate; its whereabouts now is a mystery. On his return
to Ireland in 1999, he worked as a staff writer and later as editor for
In Dublin magazine, and contributed as a freelance travel writer
for other titles including the Sunday Independent, The Irish Times
and Backpacker and Abroad magazines. In 2004 he wrote The
Little Book of Dublin published by New Island Press and began writing
for the opinion column in the Evening Herald, before working as the
editor of the arts and culture section for Village magazine.

Tom Galvin is hereby
identified as the author of this work in accordance with Section 77 of
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This book is sold
to the condition that it shall not be, by way of trade or otherwise, be
lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publishers
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which
it is published and without a similar condition including this condition
being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

This publication has
been grant-aided by the Warsaw University Society of Irish Studies [logo]